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by duped 1611 days ago
Coming from any statically typed language to Python or JavaScript codebases this plagues me. Virtually every project I have seen suffers from this.

Function names and doc comments describe behavior, not argument and return types.
2 comments
kgeist 1611 days ago
Our main codebase is in PHP, but we enforce type hinting for all new code, so it feels more like a static language at this point in practice. However, there are chunks of old code without type hinting or types in PHPDocs. Whenever I have to deal with that code (especially if it's unknown code), my productivity decreases considerably. I have to click through many layers of functions to figure out the data flow to understand what the implicit contract of a function is. In static languages, all you need to care about is a contract, the rest is implementation details. In the dynamic portions of the codebase, there's just too much cognitive load because I have to look at implementation details to get it. PHPDocs and dynamic checks seem to be pretty error-prone, because a dev often forgets to update both the code and the annotations/type checks (and type checks are often ad hoc and random), leading to even more cognitive load. Having static analyzers in the pipeline to have some control of the situation leads to longer build times, so in the end it feels like PHP builds slower than all our Go projects combined.
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vanusa 1611 days ago
Not argument and return types.

When conventions are followed they do exactly that, actually. And unless the code is a complete trainwreck, it's pretty easy to tell what the return type is, even without explicit annotation in the docstring.

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duped 1611 days ago
What conventions are those, besides Hungarian notation (which I don't think I've ever seen in Python)?
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vanusa 1611 days ago
PEP 257, and local conventions in certain projects.

What all comes down to is: if you really have people on your project writing code like the foo/bar/baz example way up above - then you have problems way bigger than static type checks can possibly help you with.

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duped 1611 days ago
Wouldn't it be something if there existed tooling that enforced this level of discipline and checked its validity before executing any code such that you didn't rely on the entire ecosystem to adhere to the same standards and remove that as a source of ambiguity...
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vanusa 1611 days ago
Which Python has had since 3.5.
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